Familiarity of Faces: Sense or Feeling?
An Exploratory Investigation With Eye Movements and Skin Conductance
Abstract
Where does the experience of familiarity come from? Is it the same as sensory perception? Two novel approaches were combined to investigate the highly adaptive process of familiar face recognition: the inclusion of friends and family members as personally familiar faces and measures of eye movements and skin conductance responses (SCR). A sample of 16 university students was asked to look at photographs of 8 personally familiar faces (friends and relatives) and 8 unfamiliar faces. From the analysis of eye movement patterns, a preference for internal features (mouth, eyes, nose) for both familiar and unfamiliar faces emerged and a significant increase in electrodermal activity was found for personally familiar compared to unfamiliar faces. Higher SCR recovery values were found in response to friends. Findings from this exploratory investigation suggest that familiar faces are not looked at in a special way; instead we “feel” a sense of familiarity that comes and goes faster for relatives than for close friends.
References
(1999). Eye-movement-based memory effect: A reprocessing effect in face perception. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25, 997–1010.
(1998). Mental representations of the self, significant others, and nonsignificant others: structure and processing of private and public aspects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 845–861.
(1987). Psychiatric screening in general practice in Italy. Social Psychiatry, 22, 113–117.
(2007). “Far from the heart far from the eye”: Evidence from the Capgras delusion. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 12, 189–197.
(1999). Verification of face identities from images captured on video. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 5, 339–360.
(2005). Understanding the recognition of facial identity and facial expression. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6, 641–651.
(2001). Capgras delusion: A window on face recognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5, 149–156.
(1979). Identification of familiar and unfamiliar faces from internal and external features: Some implications for theories of face recognition. Perception, 8, 431–439.
(1990). Accounting for delusional misidentifications. British Journal of Psychiatry, 157, 239–248.
(1993). Covert face recognition without prosopagnosia. Behavioural Neurology, 6, 27–32.
(2007). Neural systems for recognition of familiar faces. Neuropsychologia, 45, 32–41.
(2004). Social and emotional attachment in the neural representation of faces. NeuroImage, 22, 1628–1635.
(2000). The distributed human neural system for face perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 223–233.
(2011). Distributed neural systems for face perception. In , The Oxford handbook of face perception (pp. 93–107). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
(2008). More efficient scanning for familiar faces. Journal of Vision, 8, 1–10.
(2005). Face perception is mediated by a distributed cortical network. Brain Research Bulletin, 67, 87–93.
(2004). What’s special about personally familiar faces? A multimodal approach. Psychophysiology, 41, 688–701.
(1997). The fusiform face area: a module in human extrastriate cortex specialized for face perception. The Journal of Neuroscience, 17, 4302–4311.
(2006). The fusiform face area: A cortical region specialized for the perception of faces. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 361, 2109–2128.
(2011). Threat and trait anxiety affect stability of gaze fixation. Biological Psychology, 86, 330–336.
(2004). Mothers’ neural activation in response to pictures of their children and other children. Biological Psychiatry, 56, 225–232.
(1970). Manual for the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
(2005). Face processing and familiarity: Evidence from eye‐movement data. British Journal of Psychology, 96, 407–422.
(1985). Electrodermal discrimination of familiar and unfamiliar faces: A methodology. Psychophysiology, 22, 403–408.
(2009). In what sense “familiar”? Examining experiential differences within pathologies of facial recognition. Consciousness and Cognition, 18, 628–638.
